Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     I am sitting, on a warm, airless night, at a table on the dark side of a Roman piazza. Small tables litter the shadowy spaces between heavy, black stone columns. Just in front of me two priests, blacker than the stone, sip their brandies while from the corner of my eye I see a fat cockroach move soundlessly from the girth of one of the columns in search of even darker territory.

     The big columns run in an arc and eventually stand on the light side of the piazza. Here a small orchestra plays Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago, an amber spotlight making the white shirt of the saxophone soloist look like a headless, legless puppet torso. Between the light and the dark is a magnificent circular fountain, its pale jets helping to cool the hot night while high above the heads of the orchestra, at the very rim of the skyline, a white neon Campari sign shines so brightly you can hardly look at it. The finishing touch, and believe me it is true, a full moon in an almost violet sky perfectly dots the i of the sign.

     I am inhabiting a postcard, like the ones you can buy from those untidy, tall kiosks in the via. Every one a night scene. And I can move along the rack out of one card into another. Here I can stand on the wall that runs like a shadow along the edge of the Borghese gardens and look across stone balconies into those rich apartments which hang in the dark above peeling apricot walls. I can see chandeliers and the shine of silver in elegant dining rooms that await thoroughbred guests and hear the breath of a scarlet Mercedes and a white Rolls arriving in the narrow street below, their doors clicking shut with the sound that only thirty or forty million lire can achieve.

     When this postcard bores, I can step into the slowly rising curve of the Via Veneto and brave the greedy stares of the predatory homosexuals stationed beneath expensive umbrellas, toying with their delicately tinted drinks. Now I know where Fellini finds his faces. If I choose another card I can instantly be across the Tiber where the Isola Tiberina under floodlights, shines in the water as green and as unreal as the green from a child’s paint-box, and be in the teeming night streets of Trastevere. Whole families out late, laughing and jostling. The orange juice sellers with their glowing signs like giant Belisha beacons. The pocket sized roundabouts. The shadows. The sweat. But even as I speak the postcards are becoming old and dog-eared. They are no longer the bright souvenirs to be bought at a kiosk and posted home, rather they are to be found packed into boxes on the dusty shelves of those quiet back street shops for collectors and as you riffle through them, looking for this or that, the odds are that you will pass me by sitting there with my cold drink in the Roman night.

     Perhaps you would find something more to your taste in this second box sir? Views of famous landmarks. The tower of Pisa, always popular. The Eiffel tower, a bit overdone but certainly spectacular from between the legs. Perhaps the Giralda tower in Seville? No stairs to climb, just inclined floors all the way to the top and real Christian bells when you get up there, with big-eyed kestrels standing in their shade, ruffled by the breeze from the Guadalquivir.

     How about this view of Monte Capanne on Elba sir? The chair lift taking you up and away with butterflies playing over the rocks sixty feet beneath your swinging legs and every fifty yards a speaker, high up on the wire playing latin-american.

     Noisy buggers the Italians sir. Can’t stand being alone for long.

     Yes these are all high places sir. Good, broad vistas. Excellent panoramas. Well there are a few odd-balls. How about this German army cemetery at El M’dou, Tunisia? Small white crosses and black Gothic lettering, nicely tended by the locals. You don’t need much German to read them, all the Gunthers and Heinrichs, eighteen and nineteen years old mostly; the occasional feldwebel at twenty-five or twenty-six and of course the unbekannt, the unknown. Lord it can get hot there sir, miles from anywhere.

     While you are deciding which faded souvenir to add to your vicarious collection, I have moved on, tired of waiting for your dusty fingers to find me, for while you browse, I get older. Your minutes are my years. Your pastime is my lifetime.